Which pages are supposed to be internationalised?

Change 214893 had a related patch set uploaded (by Ladsgroup):
Install Extension:Translate on labswiki

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/214893

Documentation pages that help people to login and use labs like: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Tool_Labs

I'm not sure about this. How are we going to adequately support labs users if they do not speak English?

People are not divided to people who know English and people who don't. Lots of people lies between these groups. For example lots of people in Persian Wikipedia who are using labs, know English enough to use labs and run bots in it but they don't have enough knowledge to read long and technical manuals. So I had to translate it for them.

@bd808 As you mentioned it at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/268616/1, do you have any input about this task?

In T100313#2001077, @Dereckson wrote:

@bd808 As you mentioned it at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/268616/1, do you have any input about this task?

I'm not against having translations on wikitech. I'm a little cautious about how useful it will be in practice however, especially for hideous pages like Help:Tool Labs. I know that I've had some problems editing/updating the similar monolithic documentation of mw:MediaWiki-Vagrant due to not understanding all the quirks of <translate> blocks. That being said however if there are volunteers who want to work on documentation for Labs and Tool Labs in any language I'm excited about that.

@Ladsgroup What are the blockers?

It seems the concerns about translation opportunity have been addressed, with the understanding some pages won't be ideal for <translate> markup.

So, I think we can move this forward.

If you share this opinion, you can assign the task to me if you wish, I'll be happy to configure both the extension and the workflow.

Get this merged?

@Ladsgroup schedule it

@Jdforrester-WMF What are your fear and what would you like to avoid? What we could do is a small scale deployment on a dozen of simple pages, to demonstrate how it works and recommend not to use it for long documentation page in a first step. Then tools pages author will be able to decide what they wish to do.

In T100313#2618318, @Dereckson wrote:

@Jdforrester-WMF What are your fear and what would you like to avoid?

I would like people not to break wikitext by inserting <translate> and <tvar> strings into a document that needs to be processed as a DOM. Every page abused in this way is un-editable by almost all editors even in the wikitext editor, and totally unusable in the visual editor. This makes it fundamentally anti-wiki, trading a nice feature (easier translations) for higher barriers to participation. The Translate extension needs a total re-write to be based on DOM before it's appropriate to enable it in new places, but that's not likely to happen soon. It's just a total mess.

What level of translation services do we want on wikitech?

• full sectional level translation?
  • aka the full E:Translate experience

• Basic level of translation support?
  • more the classic template method style
  • just automated languages bar saying the subpages are there?
  • special page saying which pages have langcode subpages and dont

What level of translation services do we want on wikitech?

What the user asked, i.e. Translate.

Change 214893 abandoned by Chad:
Install Extension:Translate on labswiki

Reason:
Abandoning all config changes > 1y old

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/214893

What is blocking this task? I would very much like to help translating some Toolforge documentation to Ukrainian as well as help lay some pages out with Translate tags. If there are concerns about some particular pages, e.g. you want to have them reworked before making them translatable, then they simply won't be tagged for translation. It is being done manually on page by page, translatable unit by translatable unit basis anyway.

In T100313#6824626, @Base wrote:

What is blocking this task? I would very much like to help translating some Toolforge documentation to Ukrainian as well as help lay some pages out with Translate tags. If there are concerns about some particular pages, e.g. you want to have them reworked before making them translatable, then they simply won't be tagged for translation. It is being done manually on page by page, translatable unit by translatable unit anyway.

A whole lot of stuff has happened on wikitech and its docs since the creation of this task. One of the first concerns I have is basically reiterating T100313#2001094. Working with Extension:Translate marked pages as an editor with no training on the special concerns for E:Translate pages is really daunting. These seem to be similar to the things @Jdforrester-WMF noted in T100313#2623691.

Today I would personally consider @srodlund the most authoritative "owner" of the Toolforge and Cloud VPS end user documentation on Wikitech, and defer to her opinions on if and how E:Translate could be helpful.

The second issue, after consensus on the if question, is if there are likely to be any issues with using E:Translate on the "snowflake" wiki deployment of wikitech outside of the main Wikimedia wiki cluster. There continue to be issues with wikitech that are caused by assumptions of service consolidation made for the main cluster which break things on Wikitech. Issues of this type are not likely to be resolved until T237773: Move Wikitech onto the production MW cluster is implemented.

Personally I'd like to see T131516 hard-block this task, as I'm afraid the current extension behavior makes doc updates less likely to happen. [citation needed]

This is suggested again in https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikitech/SUL-migration#c-JrandWP-20241001131300-Iniquity-20241001120400

In T100313#10191749, @Bugreporter wrote:

This is suggested again in https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikitech/SUL-migration#c-JrandWP-20241001131300-Iniquity-20241001120400

The general concern of the availability of translators, translate admins, and training for those who otherwise maintain the user facing help docs on Wikitech persists. Maybe we should let the full SUL migration complete and folks get used to Wikitech being a SUL wiki before we worry about the general complexity of trying to match metawiki and mediawikiwiki's page translation capabilities?

Another point to be considered is how adding E:Translate may affect maintenance of https://wikitech-static.wikimedia.org/.

In T100313#10194217, @bd808 wrote:

Another point to be considered is how adding E:Translate may affect maintenance of https://wikitech-static.wikimedia.org/.

I will say the current implementation of Wikitech-static may not be the best one. We can just replace it with an template expanded version of Wikitech (so we can also use Wikidata freely), or even a HTML mirror (but search should be reimplemented).

In T100313#10194214, @bd808 wrote:

In T100313#10191749, @Bugreporter wrote:

This is suggested again in https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikitech/SUL-migration#c-JrandWP-20241001131300-Iniquity-20241001120400

The general concern of the availability of translators, translate admins, and training for those who otherwise maintain the user facing help docs on Wikitech persists. Maybe we should let the full SUL migration complete and folks get used to Wikitech being a SUL wiki before we worry about the general complexity of trying to match metawiki and mediawikiwiki's page translation capabilities?

Note I have a potential future solution: to "mirror" the mediawiki.org translationadmin group to Wikitech (i.e. all translationadmin in mediawiki.org becomes translationadmin in Wikitech automatically). I will file a task for it several days later